Gary's Game Engine ? Thoughts

[wargamer123]

I have played some of Gary's games going back some time. I notice his new game engine, as this resembles his WW2 Game Engine, much like Paradox does similar engines and Battlefront did a lot of similar engines. I personally worry of this at times. That a designer cranks out a game and it doesn't live up to expectations as being Unique......Just to sell copies... I am a bit concerned as Gary's recent WW2 games sort of fell short of my expectations, and their features left them wanting more

So I'm curious here....... Will there be a Demo? Also, from what I do see it appears more simplistic than some of the Previous Civil War Games. What's the playability going to be like. I hope that a lot of thought and ingenuity has gone into this. The idea looks pretty solid and there is a lot of promise...

[GShock]

Having AWD and seeing WBTS i can honestly say that the only thing the 2 games have in common is the way they look in the menu and buttons along with the general concept of strategic movement while the rest, i ensure you, is totally different. What's before AWD i can't know, but i see GG is also developing a WW2 air strategic game that also looks very promising.

Carrying on your argument, I'd say Creative Assembly has done much much worse in comparison.
They took the Total war line from STW to MTW2 (including all the expansions that came along) changing just minor graphic things. The one thing we all required, years and years ago, was the online campaigning.
They turned it down and everyone can see now that the AI is so faulty that modders have reverted to handicapping the player to give him a challenge with heavy scripting. [:)]

I'm taking CA as an example because you mentioned Paradox, but this policy is common to hundreds of Dev houses some of which are very successful.

I think FoF is truly a great game for example, and while i understand the choices of WCS, it truly pains me to see they have, at least for now, chosen to work on other things rather than bringing down FoF to the state of legend that it could attain. Your concern is the same i've always had and always expressed publicly.

There is only 1 exception, as far as i know, of company that acts the same but keeping alive the previous project, and it's AgeOD. Whenever a new title is released, since they use the same engine, the other titles are retrofitted with patches coming from their late "discoveries". This attitude is sublime but, unfortunately it's only an exception.

Considering statistics is a science and not an opinion, i'd say that the companies who win are those who adopted the questionable, but effective policy you mentioned.

[Joel Billings]

Unfortunately we have no plans to do a demo. We just don't have the programmer time available to do the demo (not the right programmer), without delaying our next war in russia game by more than we can afford to do. This came up yesterday on the wargame newsgroup and I posted that if there is a very good C programmer out there interested in working on a demo of WBTS for not much more than the fun of it, they should contact me at 2by3@2by3games.com. With World at War we were able to provide a 4 turn demo that showed people what the game was like and gave them a decent quick goal (I think it was the invasion of Russia in 1941). I don't think there is any short demo we could give that would really give you much of a sense of WBTS, because you don't have the freedom of action that one has in WaW/AWD. In WBTS, you need to have your generals get initiative to attack. If all the Union generals get initiative, it's probably game over pretty quickly for the Confederates. So if we just let players play the first 4 turns of the 1862 or 1863 scenario their experience would vary greatly based on what initiative their leaders got. And the reality is that without the manual, and the in game and video tutorials, as a player you wouldn't have a clue how to get your armies together in such a way to be able to attack. You might be able to play the Confeds against the Union AI, but again, your results would vary depending on what kind of initiative the Union AI had. So a short demo would give you a chance to view info screens and move some units around, but you'd easily miss the excitement that comes from seeing how things develop through a 48 turn game.

This game in terms of interface and units is simpler than many other CW games, but it won't be simpler to learn how to play well. There's a ton of decisions you are making and options that you have every turn, but you may not realize what they are. I think this game looks simple due to area movement, generic unit types, and the ability to sit down and jump right into moving units around, but in reality it's a very complex game. Many thought WaW/AWD was a chess-like experience, with certain moves having certain known counter-moves, and with the ability to predict the outcomes of most attacks (and the impact of adding an additional unit to an attack). WBTS is not like that. When you launch an attack, you develop a gut sense of what's likely to happen, but there are so many variables involved (not to mention unknown things your opponent may do before the battle is resolved) that the result cannot be known with any certainty. That alone makes for a completely different feel to WBTS than WaW/AWD (for good or for bad, depending on your gaming preferences).